Anime Retrospect: Tenchi Muyo! Part 2

With Kagato vanquished, all Tenchi wants is to go back to living an ordinary life with his mad scientist, space pirate, and magic princess friends, just like everyone else.

Welcome back for part two of my look back at my introduction to anime: Tenchi Muyo! I thought I’d try something a little different for this part. Reviewing the series as a whole has forced me to give a broad summary of the plot and skim through each individual episode. While this effective in reviewing the story and characters, it’s left me skipping over a lot of the comedic bits and the purely entertaining moments not necessary to the plot. So I’ll leave the majority of the second half of the series for my next review, and for this segment I’ll dig deep into a single episode, “The Night before the Carnival”.

To give a bit of history, “The Night before the Carnival” was not originally meant be a part of the series itself. It was originally released as a stand-alone episode called the “Ryo-Ohki Special” and acted as a sort of epilogue to the original story arc, taking place just after the encounter with Kagato. Once the second set of OVA episodes was made, however, the Ryo-Ohki special was relabeled the seventh episode of the overall series.. The title is pretty much meaningless, since there is no carnival in this or any other episode. (Interestingly, episode 7 of the TV remake Tenchi Universe actually does feature a carnival) To be fair, “Ryo-Ohki Special” is also a meaningless title, since Ryo-Ohki is of no greater importance in this episode than in any other. Being originally a special, it’s somewhat longer than the other episodes, clocking in at about forty minutes. Toonami had to give it a full hour’s worth of space to air it, filling in the extra time with cartoon shorts.

We open up with a shot of Azaka and Kamidake, exactly where they were at the end of the last episode, standing by the gate in front of the house. It amuses me that Azaka and Kamidake are Jurai Guardians, royal bodyguards who supposedly get all kinds of respect on their home world, and in Tenchi Universe they even heroically sacrifice themselves to resurrect two badass warrior-mages. That in itself is enough to make them awesome. And here they are, reduced to mere doormen. And that’s pretty much what they are from now on. Anyway, Tenchi wakes up and sees the disembodied face of Ryoko hovering over his bed. Wait, that can’t be right.

Huh.

 

I’m pretty sure she was supposed to be poking her face through the wall from the next room over, but the animation makes her look like something Simon Belmont would hit with his whip from sheer force of habit. And it isn’t helped by the fact that her face is all worn out from her staying up all night to watch over him like the creepy stalker she apparently is. Tenchi tells her to leave him alone and goes into the bathroom. As he gets undressed he notices a ring on his finger and tries to take it off, but tugging on it just activates its magical powers (I guess) and causes it to cover him in the Juraian battle outfit that he was wearing when he fought Kagato. This is supposed to fill in a plot hole or two, but... it just raises further questions! Tenchi presumably got this ring from Tsunami, but where did she get it? What about Ayeka’s battle gear? Does she have the same kind of ring? If so, where is it? Why didn’t we see this ring in the last episode? Why do we never see it again? Why doesn’t Tenchi know how to reverse the ring’s effects, especially since he has clearly done so once already?

A seed falls out of a pocket in the battle suit, and once he figures out how to make the suit go away again he gives the seed to Ayeka. He tells her that the seed belongs to Ryu-Oh and that Tsunami gave it to him. Ayeka then visits Washu, who has taken up residence in a pocket dimension with an entrance through a door under the stairway. This, by the way, is one of those things that the audience is just supposed to figure out. While it isn’t that hard to put together, throwing the words “pocket dimension” into one line of dialogue wouldn’t have been that hard, would it? Washu, typing away on her badass astral laptop, refuses to listen to Ayeka’s request unless Ayeka refers to her as “Washu-chan” or “Little Washu”. Ayeka forces a smile on her face and does so, though she doesn’t feel inclined to do it because Washu is over 20,000 years old.

Wait, what? Twenty thousand? This series has already slung around quite a few characters whose life-spans make Methuselah’s seem tragically cut short, but being 20,000 years old makes her older than all human civilization. Honestly, she would have to be some kind of deity to reach that age and… hmm? Oh. Right. I’ll get into that in a little later. So Ayeka asks Washu for a way to grow Ryu-Oh’s seed and Washu agrees, handing her a flower pot. Ayeka responds by smacking her on the head with it, prompting her to insist that she was just kidding. She proceeds to go through the rest of the conversation with it sitting on her head, invoking the old comedy rule that something unusual on someone’s head gets funnier and funnier the longer it stays there.

h=1.3m(I_x/I_y)t²+2.5mA_s(ω²/g²), where h=hilarity

 

In truth, Washu decides to use something Kagato made, a capsule conforming to the environment of Jurai. He meant to use it for Tsunami, but it will work for Ryu-Oh just as well. Meanwhile, Ryoko sees Mihoshi and Sasami reading shoujo manga (girls' comics, if you're not familiar with the terminology) and asks them about it. Sasami tells her that they’re about the art of love, “Earth-style”, and Ryoko decides to research them to find a way to get Tenchi to fall in love with her. Tenchi visits Washu’s lab to call her and Ayeka for breakfast, but Washu gets Tenchi alone and straps him into her machinery to run some experiments on him. After running a few tests and finding nothing unusual about his biology that might explain his extraordinary abilities, Washu decides to collect her “most important sample”. 

By this, of course, she means Tenchi’s sperm, and this obviously requires that she suddenly dress up in a nurse’s uniform and wear an evil smile that makes Light Yagami look like a well-adjusted goody-two-shoes. But before she can take the sample she’s interrupted by Mihoshi, who has gotten lost and stumbled into the lab, despite Washu’s meek protests that such a thing is impossible. This series has a tendency to gloss over some of the best jokes and let the implications of them suddenly hit you after a few minutes. Mihoshi, here, has found a location that can’t be reached by accident, by accident. That’s like if you made a wrong turn on your way to the grocery store and the next thing you knew you were at the summit of Mt. Everest. The very laws of logic bend in the presence of Mihoshi. That’s it, I’m granting her an honorary membership in the Dai-Gurren Brigade.

Scary how well this works, isn't it?

 

By the way, I wouldn’t think too deeply about the implications of this scene as a whole, because it stops being funny really quick if you do, what with Tenchi being restrained and everything.

What is funny in a more family-friendly way is the next scene, in which Ryoko attempts to put her study of shoujo manga to good use. It might be hard to fully appreciate the parody in the next few scenes if you’re unfamiliar with the tropes of Japanese romance stories, but it works well enough on its own, either way. So Ryoko engineers a situation where she “accidentally” “bumps into” Tenchi. If you freeze frame it at just the right moment, you’ll see it happens more like this:

Love hurts, pal.

 

She acts shy and pretends that she and Tenchi have never met, which obviously does less to earn Tenchi’s affection than it does to confuse the fuck out of him. Mihoshi interrupts the scene just as Ryoko gets to “the important part”, whatever that means, and drags Ryoko away before the act can continue. Ayeka was present to witness this and wonders what the hell that was all about. Sasami explains it to her and - having just watched Ryoko make an ass of herself, mind you - decides to try it out herself. Ayeka’s attempt goes in much the same way, except that she trips Tenchi with a rope stretched across the stairs instead of kicking him. She gives him her handkerchief to bandage his injury, which of course is completely imaginary, before turning back as she leaves to introduce herself. As their first attempts have failed to win Tenchi’s heart, the girls fall back to their default strategy: following him around and hiding. Meanwhile, Katsuhito composes a mighty awesome haiku:

Hangers-on, though you

be friends, be more humble when

asking for seconds.

So the girls try again. Ayeka knits Tenchi a sweater, but makes it far too big. Ryoko tries her hand at cooking, which ends with Ryo-Ohki taste-testing her work and critiquing it by falling off the kitchen counter and landing on her head. You gotta respect that level of dedication. Finally, Tenchi figures out that they’ve been acting on the advice of the romance books and informs them that they’re all at least ten years out of date. He gets one brief glimpse of victory before Washu pops in with a more recent book and declares that it shows her to be the best match with Tenchi. Ryoko changes up her tactics and goes to Katsuhito in an attempt to persuade him to arrange a marriage between herself and Tenchi – which is really rather bold considering that she once faced this guy in mortal combat – but finds that Mihoshi is already winning his favor without actually trying.

Tenchi goes to get some carrots for Sasami, only to find them all missing. He suspects Ryo-Ohki, but is surprised to find an entire stack of Ryo-Ohkis hiding in the shadows. It turns out these are the control crystals of Ryo-Ohki’s spaceship form. Tenchi gives in and lets each of them take one carrot, which is enough to exhaust the entire stock.  This scene accomplishes nothing, but it’s cute.

 

Ryoko and Ayeka meet in the bath house. They agree that things would be easier if they only had each other to compete with, without Mihoshi and Washu, and decide to work together to get rid of the others. They then have some internal monologue as they bathe, Ryoko’s being the most entertaining as she contemplates herself and Tenchi being compatible “humanoid-types”. They set their plan in motion with Ryoko calling Mihoshi and impersonating her boss at the Galaxy Police. She orders Mihoshi to return to HQ to make her report on the Kagato incident. Mihoshi is unsure how to return to HQ without a ship, but Ayeka suggests that Washu can find a way to get Mihoshi “a spaceship or two”. Washu does this easily enough, by simply pulling Mihoshi’s ship out of subspace with her magic astral laptop. There’s a brief moment of panic as Ryoko’s water demon appears as well, riding on the back of the ship, but Washu literally defeats the demon with one finger. There’s a tearful goodbye as Mihoshi prepares to leave Earth. Tenchi invites her to come back any time that she wants.

The scene of Ryoko and Ayeka taking care of Washu happens off-screen, sadly. We only know from a bit of dialogue and a background shot of the boarded up door to Washu’s lab that they have trapped her inside it. Sort of. With Washu and Mihoshi gone, Ryoko and Ayeka’s truce breaks down immediately. Ryoko ties Ayeka up and leaves her in a storage room. 

Mihoshi arrives at a docking station to send in her written report via space e-mail. Her ship’s computer, Yukinojo, asks for her password, which turns out to be “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.” Um, yeah… nursery rhymes. Mihoshi herself even seems incredulous that the Galaxy Police are using nursery rhymes as passwords. Because it’s not just Mihoshi; in episode 13, we learn that Mihoshi’s superior uses the password “And they all lived happily ever after. The end.” Why an organization with as grand and serious a purpose as fighting crime throughout the goddamn galaxy would use something as childish as that for their secret passwords is a mind-boggling question that I haven’t really found an answer for. Maybe the Galaxy Police is just run by infantile goofballs, and that’s why Mihoshi is considered one of their best officers. But in that case any competent, serious-minded officer would be absolutely miserable working in such an environment.

Oh. Right.

 

Mihoshi’s superior congratulates her on her successful mission and offers her a position at the central office. Instead she requests to be assigned to the Solar System and stationed on Earth. Her superior protests that the Galaxy Police aren’t allowed on Earth without the permission of Jurai (because Jurai owns Earth… somehow), but since Tenchi asked her to come back, she technically has Jurai’s permission. I assume that this scene was immediately followed by the ghosts of Niccolo Machiavelli and Hans Gruber being summoned by the audacity of Mihoshi’s scheme to offer her high fives.

With everyone out of the way, Ryoko fantasizes about finally having Tenchi to herself. And, not content to do this in any but the most awesome way possible, she acts out the scene she’s planned out by splitting into two separate bodies and having one of them play Tenchi. Why Ryoko has never used this ability for a practical purpose when it’s easily one of her most inherently useful skills is a mystery to me. And the fact that in her imagination she still has to wrench pity out of Tenchi to oblige a half-hearted love confession from him is probably quite telling of her self-esteem. But what really sells this scene is that Ryoko, somehow dressed up even sluttier than in all those scenes where she’s naked, is actually cackling with glee at the prospect that she might get laid tonight. She’s a badass space pirate who’s lived for a millennium or more and apparently has the mindset of a horny teenager, and that strikes me as hilarious.

As Ryoko tries to sneak into Tenchi’s room, she activates a shield set up by Ayeka that teleports her into the middle of the lake. When she gets back into the house she finds that Ayeka has freed herself. She tries talking her way past the princess, very nearly tricking Ayeka into consenting to let her have Tenchi. But of course it doesn’t work and the two of them end up essentially sumo wrestling, because this is Japan and by law all disputes have to be settled by either sumo or giant robot sword-fights. And since Ryo-Ohki doesn’t turn into a giant robot until Tenchi in Tokyo…

Dear God do I wish I was kidding.

 

While all of this is going on, Sasami has another prophetic dream, this one involving a fall from a great height leaving her dying in a pool of her own blood. Yeah, it’s a little more hardcore than the last one. Tenchi arrives to help her, but he’s taken away by a celestial looking woman named Tokimi. This scene provides a vital clue to the ending of the series, which is great because the ending of the series took its sweet ass time for over a decade before finally showing up, and it doesn’t actually count. Instead of sitting around waiting for the ending, the fans spent that time figuring out the entire plot themselves. How’d they do that? Well, here, take a look at Tokimi:

She’s obviously an extremely powerful super-being, yeah? Perhaps even a deity of some sort? OK, now look at the silhouettes above her shoulders. The one on the right side of the screen appears to be Tsunami. That makes enough sense; Tsunami is an extremely powerful super-being herself. Now look at the other one. Look familiar?

Yup, that is clearly Washu. The great big plot twist at the end is that Washu is actually a goddess. The gems are the manifestations of her power, which she has given up for the time being. That’s why only she or her descendants (i.e. Ryoko) can use them. Now, the reason I’m spoiling this plot twist is that it never gets openly explained until the third OVA which, as I said, doesn’t count. It doesn’t really come into play for the rest of the actual series, except that it explains why Tokimi is interested in seeing Washu in episodes 11 and 12, which otherwise doesn’t make much sense. All of this was deduced by that silhouette, and it actually makes things so obvious that when it finally came time to reveal that giant plot twist, the writers assumed the audience had already figured it out and didn’t make a big deal out of it.

So, to finish off the plot of this episode, Sasami is scared by her nightmare and goes to Tenchi’s room to sleep. She knocks on the door, which deactivates Ayeka’s trap, and Tenchi lets her in. Ryoko and Ayeka then learn that Washu is in Tenchi’s room as well (why they thought they could outsmart Washu and trap her in her lab could only be out of naivety), and even Ryo-Ohki is there. Pissed that after all their effort they are now the only girls not in Tenchi’s room, they try to force their way in as well, getting caught in Ayeka’s trap and teleported out to the lake. At that moment Mihoshi returns from space and crash lands, demolishing the house (it’s fine by the next episode, though). Everyone spends the night in Washu’s lab and Ayeka wakes up in the morning to find that Ryu-Oh’s seed has begun to sprout.

And that’s “The Night before the Carnival”. Nothing especially important, but fun nonetheless. Up next is the final segment of my three-part series, which covers episodes 8-13. Don’t miss it!

Tenchi Muyo! and all related images and characters are property of Geneon Entertainment, Funimation Entertainment, Anime International, and Masaki Kajishima. Images used from Tenchi Muyo!, Tenchi Universe, and Tenchi in Tokyo. Image of sunglasses from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.